Later Years
by Caius
Summary: Four years after Zim's arrival on Earth, he still has no clue of his fake mission, and he and Dib still wage their very personal war, in addition, now they're in Hi-Skool.
1. I: The Beginning of It All

Disclaimer: I don't own Invader Zim. I didn't write "Smooth Criminal." I would like to acknowledge "Girl Who Store the Stars" from Chrono Cross and "Smooth Criminal" for inspiring this chapter. Enjoy.

---

Gaz sat down, ready to play a game. After a day of skool, she needed a break. Eighth grade wasn't all that hard; she was a bright girl. Sometimes, though, she felt especially lazy, and would steal away to Dib's room and take his old work and simply copy it.

She was fourteen. The only way she had changed in the four years since Zim had first shown up was how she dressed. Gaz now wore a shirt with long black sleeves and a deep purple torso. Instead of a skirt or dress she had on black pants. As for her hair, her previous style remained, but a puffy ponytail sprouted from the back, secured with a black velvet scrunchie. The skull necklace she had worn in her tenth year was still on around her neck.

"Finally, some quiet time," Gaz murmured, turning the old Game Slave 2 on. Just as she began to play, the doorbell rang.

"Figures," she sighed, moving to the front door. She wondered who it could be; no one ever came over to their house, and it couldn't be for Professor Membrane as he was out at his lab. Gaz turned the knob and opened the door. She gasped, not in surprise but in amusement.

Zim.

Gaz grinned and leaned against the doorframe. The boy with green skin smirked back with his strange teeth. It was strange to see Zim's new style of clothing and hair after him wearing the same thing for four years, and she noticed something new added to his wardrobe-

"GAZ!" Dib shouted from upstairs. "WHO'S AT THE DOOR?!"

Gaz rolled her eyes. "Pizza!" she shouted back. A lie. The rivalry between Zim and Dib was very funny, especially at times of confrontation.

The alien stood on the porch, the smirk still on his face. His entire form was different; he now stood at a height of 5"8', and this seemed to bring him a strange sort of pride. He wore a red long-sleeved turtleneck shirt, which bore a strange one-eyed black symbol with antennae on it. His hair was still black, but divided into two parts: the first was a big puff on the right side of his head, the second a frizzy mass, and these were divided by half an inch of green skin. Black pants, gloves, and boots still were still part of his garb, as was that silly little pink and gray backpack-like thing on his back that never seemed to move. Stranger still, it seemed to have grown with him.

Tonight, a new addition to this usual set of clothes was a long black trench coat. It was darker than Dib's, a deeper black than the night sky outside, the sky that was peppered with flashes of lightning, blasts of thunder, and speckles of rain that fell from the above heavens.

Taking in all the things around her for no reason, Gaz locked eyes with those of Zim's, those blue eyes that she remembered concealed very different ones. That didn't matter. Zim wasn't her problem; he was Dib's obsession. Lately his world conquering seemed to have come to a halt with the start of hi-skool. 

Gaz smiled at Zim. "Dib's still going to come down and check to see who it is. He's going to be mad to see you, but then again, you're here to see him, aren't you?" she queried, expecting a confirmation from the green kid in front of her.

"Perhaps…" Zim began.

With one fluid motion, Zim reached out and took the skull charm in his palm, pulling Gaz slightly forward. His eyes contained a focused, sure feel within them, and it was something eerily unnerving as well. A small smile broke out on his face. His grip on the medallion relaxed a little, and his sleek gloved hand came to rest right above Gaz's heart.

"…Perhaps not," he concluded.

Gaz grew confused. _'…Wha…what's Zim doing?' _she asked herself. _'…Does he like me?'_

_'Do I like him…?'_

---

A computer terminal behind Dib began to whirl, make noise, and its screen glowed bright red. He spun on his chair and slid over to the keyboard. He clicked the mouse to see what it was trying to say. A warning, an alert. 

Damn! One of the sections of Zim's underground labs – the central command unit, the area that controlled all the defenses of the house – which he had destroyed the previous night, had been replenished! But now he knew that it took about twenty-four hours for that part to be functional again, and so much for trying to set off the self-destruct of Zim's base tonight.

The same as Gaz, Dib had changed too. His scythe shaped hair was now hanging down in front of his face, and his skin was very much paler. His trench coat was longer, of course, since he had grown, to 5"10' to be precise, and it was thrown casually on his messy unkempt bed. In the place of Dib's old shirt with the ' | _ | ' on it, he wore a long-sleeved blue turtleneck with the Swollen Eyeball logo on the chest. The paranormal group's headquarters had been blown up right before his eyes as he was trapped, helpless to do anything but just watch two years ago. He was lucky to escape Zim's cavernous labs with his life, and he wore the insignia in memory of all the members who had been killed by Zim that night during their meeting. Other than that, his clothes were unchanged.

Dib's face was a different story entirely. The skin was a ghostly, pasty white color from controlling assaults on Zim's labs from his room and his numerous computer terminals, and from only leaving the house for manual attacks and stealth missions on at night. He scurried quickly to skool in the mornings, following Zim at a distance that the alien didn't know he was behind. After skool, Dib leave earlier than Zim and crouch in the alleyways around Zim's house behind garbage cans with a notebook, pen, and camcorder, observing him, finding out what there was left to know. His hands were thin and bony, and for Dib manning a console was easier to do than speaking. Tall and thin, he was often made fun of by the other boys at skool for his appearance, and the fact that he was always skulking around, hunched deep within his black trench coat, stalking Zim at every turn.

"The hell if they know anything," Dib muttered, not even sparing the time to string together a better comeback to his memories of their taunts and jeers. Instead he put his feet up on the edge of the desk and pushed until the wheels on the chair took him in the opposite direction of the terminals and he bumped into his bed. He dragged himself up onto the bed and stared up at his ceiling, the ceiling on which, three years prior, he had painted a perfect map of the sky for no reason other than to look up at it.

Dib sighed. He was glad to have this small moment of peace. His days and nights were filled with nothing but Zim this and Zim that, all his effort and time went to trying to expose the damn alien that his intellect alone was getting him through all the honors classes at hi-skool. He had gotten in as many of Zim's classes as possible, but seeing how Zim had somehow picked up German and could speak it better than the German IV class teachers, Zim had no new language to study.

Dib closed his eyes. After a minute, he opened them, staring to the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. He sighed.

_'Better get to work, see if I can shut down his base defenses again and set off the destruct before the defenses comes back online,' _He thought, then his stomach growled. He had been living off liquids for some time, a can of fizzy pop here and there, strong coffee to keep him up through the nights, enabling him to stare at the computer a while longer. Dark circles could be seen under his eyes as the lightning lit up his room inside. 

The rain soothed his mind, and he almost felt like sleeping. And he wondered why he couldn't smell Gaz's pizza. It was strange that the motion sensors that he had set up in the front yard hadn't alerted him of any approaching Bloaty's pizza deliveryman. Perhaps they were malfunctioning. He would have gone downstairs to check out the pizza man, but then the brain of Zim's house got restarted. Coincidence, surely.

…Coincidence?

Dib sat bolt upright on his bed. His eyes were wide and white, his brain totally awake, every neuron firing. The doorbell. No alert. Something troubling that pushed going downstairs out of his mind. 

No way in hell was this coincidence.

Suddenly Dib leapt up, tripping over his wheeled chair. Falling flat on his stomach, banging his chin roughly on the floor, he clambered to his feet and yelled at the top of his lungs.

"GAZ!"

Dib flew out of his room at high speed, slamming into a wall. He regained his coordination and bounded down the steps. As he flung himself down the carpeted stairs, everything seemed to slow down.

---

(1st Person: Dib)

As I took the stairs three at a time, my unbalanced legs faltering more than once, all events slowed. All the possibilities of what might have happened screamed at me. The past came flooding back to me.

Four years ago I wouldn't have been so concerned with something like this, but since the stakes have grown in our little game, I've learned to take everything as a bad omen not to trust anything. Zim has grown cunning and crafty, and has adapted at a slow but sufficient rate. The one thing that holds him back is his arrogance, still as strong after so long.

We've grown, changed, and become monsters in our own ways.

Such is life; such is what you must do to secure the fate of an entire planet.

---

Zim stared at the floor, a solemn expression plastered on his face. He was silent, stolid. As he lifted his gloved hands up to examine them, however, he grinned widely. The open door sprayed rainwater at him, but he had long ago stopped worrying about water. Cold winds made his trench coat flap, giving him the ominous look he had intended to have when he donned it.

"All these years…" Zim said to himself, hearing a yell of rage and urgency from upstairs, the voice obviously Dib's.

"GAZ! CLOSE THE DAMN DOOR!" the human thundered.

"…_His_ victories. _His _gains. Finally I have taken something from _him. _And this loss will echo in his gooey heart…"

As the human trounced down the stairs, Zim sat down on a nearby table and, scattering a quarter-empty pizza box and several juice boxes and pop cans, he waited.

Instants later, Dib leapt from the stairs and almost fell down. His eyes locked on Zim and instantly filled with deep hate, and the Irken only smiled. Slowly, or so it seemed but not actually was, Dib's gaze crept to the form lying on the floor. He sunk to his knees with disbelief. Loss resounded in his eyes and the expression on his face. Within moments tears were splashing down his face and onto the floor, mingling with the blood on the carpet.

"Merry Christmas, stink worm," Zim taunted. He hopped nimbly off the table and with trench coat sweeping behind him; he sauntered out the open door, leaving it so.

A white hand, shaking so much it seemed it would fall off, reached out and touched the neck of the corpse, feeling for a pulse. When all the hand met with was cold dead skin, it pulled back, sticky and wet with dark blood. Dib's lips trembled, and the tears kept falling, salting and wetting the purple hair.

Gaz.

Her throat cut, blood everywhere, Gaz lay dead on the carpet. Dib didn't even think. He fell forward and clutched at her lifeless form, hugged her, buried his head against the icy skin of the back of her neck and her long, soft, purple hair. Whimpers and sobs were muffled and every instant lasted for what seemed like forever, and yet was twisted and disoriented, like it couldn't possibly be real.

Dib's left hand gently stroked Gaz's face as he turned his head so he was no longer tangled in her hair. Her blood streaked his face, hands, and clothes, but he didn't care. He touched the slash in her throat as if it would cause her pain, then, moving his hand slowly up to her face, he felt and saw that there was a cut on her forehead which had opened to let a river of blood cascade over her eyes, preventing any defense and no sight of anything but red haze.

"Gaz," he sobbed, kissing her cheek gently. He could taste coppery blood in his mouth, and he knew it wasn't his own. Nothing mattered right now; there was nothing, nothing but this sadness, this mourning, this loss that completely penetrated his thoughts and every aspect of his soul, mind, and heart.

It was December. The seventeenth. Almost Christmas. The thunderstorm outside was turning to snow, which drifted beautifully to the ground before evaporating. And yet as ever-chiller wind blew in through the door and the stars in the sky shone light onto the streets between passing clouds, Dib keep a firm grip on Gaz. He put his one arm around her torso and the other behind her head. Oblivious to the fact he was lying on a great puddle of blood that exuded from almost innumerable parts of his sister, Dib touched his forehead to the side of Gaz's head and slept with his exhaustion and as he drifted off to a troubled stillness, tears still ran out of his eyes and into Gaz's hair.

---

_As he came into the window  
Was a sound of a crescendo  
He came into her apartment  
He left the bloodstains on the carpet  
She was sitting at the table  
He could see she was unable  
So she ran into the bedroom  
She was struck down  
It was her doom _

_Annie, are you OK  
Are you OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
You OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie_

_Annie, are you OK  
Will you tell us that you're OK  
There's a sign at the window  
That he struck you  
A crescendo, Annie  
He came into your apartment  
He left the bloodstains on the carpet  
Then you ran into the bedroom  
You were struck down  
It was your doom_

_Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
You've been hit by  
You've been struck by  
A smooth criminal_

_So they came into the outway  
It was Sunday  
What a black day  
I could feel your salutation  
Sounding heartbeats  
Intimidations___

_Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie_

_Annie, are you OK  
Will you tell us that you're OK  
There's a sign at the window  
That he struck you  
A crescendo, Annie  
He came into your apartment  
He left the bloodstains on the carpet  
Then you ran into the bedroom  
You were struck down  
It was your doom_

_Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
You've been hit by  
You've been struck by  
A smooth criminal_

_Annie, are you OK  
Will you tell us that you're OK  
There's a sign at the window  
That he struck you  
A crescendo, Annie  
He came into your apartment  
He left the bloodstains on the carpet  
Then you ran into the bedroom  
You were struck down  
It was your doom_

_Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie  
Annie, are you OK  
You OK  
Are you OK, Annie_

"Smooth Criminal" by Alien Ant Farm

---


	2. II: Attack

Dib wasn't thoroughly surprised that no one believed him when he accused Zim of killing Gaz, but he surely didn't expect Zim to have enough foresight to introduce a 'new' disease into his sister through the wounds that made it look like it had ravaged her from within. For that, he had been trying _very _hard to find Zim during the days of rage and depression and endless hurt after that night. He had desired nothing more then to find the alien and beat the living hell out of him.

Zim also worked harder then, mostly to avoid the driven human's attacks. Several times he had been caught between a rock and a hard place and escaped with suck luck it was amazing.

Now it was two months after Gaz's death, to the day. Dib stood in front of the tombstone with the fresh, exposed earth in front of it. He knelt down, and put both his hands on it and leaning forward. His forehead soon touched cold granite. Then, the sadness came raging up through him until the salty tears once more slid down his face, caressing his skin. Dib then became lost in his memories of the day of the funeral.

---

It had been a bitterly cold, snowy day. Dib and his father were there, of course, and also some relatives had come. Gaz had no friends, so when there was an absent of youths at this youth's funeral, it shocked no one.

Halfway through the eulogy, right after Dib had spoken, he noticed someone had just arrived and was standing at the back of the crowd. He didn't even need to turn his head and get a good look to see the alien in disguise, standing there.

"Excuse me," he had choked out through incredible seething rage to his dad. Then, not even hearing what Membrane had to say in reply, Dib had walked as calmly as he could towards Zim. The Irken had smirked, then turned around and ran out of the church and into some nearby woods.

"ZIM!!" Dib roared that day whilst chasing the figure not far ahead of him. Finally, he caught up, not tired in the least for the torrent of emotions he held within had fueled him, and saw that the alien was waiting for him in a clearing.

"Foolish human… You shall follow your pathetic sister…soon," Zim had sneered, then his spider limbs had come from his utility pack and he had climbed up into a tree and was gone.

Dib fell to his knees and grasped the grass and dirt. He held it so tightly he crushed the dirt into a little ball, and his fingernails dug into his palm, drawing blood. He didn't feel the pain, or the blood trickling down his skin into the grass. All that was present in his mind then was the rage and hurt. Just the seething, kill-everything-yet-only-Zim anger, and the sorrow-tearing loss. These ravaged his mind, heart and soul every instant, and they hadn't stopped on that day.

---

"Gaz…" Dib whispered. Then, his ear twitched. Someone was here and was trying to be very quiet. Dib whirled around, his coat flailing behind him.

Zim stood up on a hill none too far away, staring down at Dib. Then, he broke into a cruel smile with his Irken teeth. Zim was wearing his own trench coat again, and it flapped in the cold February wind.

"Stinking human… You have returned here, as expected. Ha ha! What sentimental fools you people are. I will enjoy destroying all of you. And you, Dib-worm, get to be the first to fall to my power." Zim laughed loud and maniacally.

The boy pulled back his emotions and set them aside. He stood stoically; ready for whatever the alien was going to throw at him.

"You're still the same pathetic being, Zim," Dib uttered quietly. "Your arrogance will be your undoing, I promise. And I'll be the one to kill you."

"Hee hee… Perhaps if the fight was still one-on-one, but now it is not so fair…" Zim raised his hands high into the air. "My minions! My subjects! Come, arise! Blow this stink monkey into oblivion! Hahahaha!!"

From on the top of hill rose about twenty people. They were strange, scraggly people and looked like psychos. Dib recognized them instantly as the local UFO cult; nuts that even Dib didn't like that thought tin cans and blenders were alien objects. There was something about them now, however, as they all raised some type of laser gun. He could see they all had the same black symbol stamped into their hands as Zim wore on his shirt.

"After him! And don't let him get away… If you can, spare his pathetic life, and bring him to me…!" Zim cackled, then pointed erratically at Dib. The cult flooded down the hill after Dib.

They took aim with their guns and fired. Dib leapt out of the way, but the red-hot lasers still blazed past him. Two grazed him, but he was too dumbstruck by the appearance of the mob to feel the pain. One seared his cheek; another ripped through his coat and shirt at his left shoulder and rolled across the skin there, and also blew up all the clothing material on his shoulder.

The lasers shredded the land around him, and more joined them. Some flew wildly and struck Gaz's tombstone. The twenty of Zim's cult had been joined by so many more, and they were all after Dib.

Dib turned and ran. He leapt over gravestones, crashed through briar patches, and tried to avoid the little patches of snow that absorbed his footfalls for all to see. He ran and ran and ran. He didn't stop, not even when the shouts of his pursuers quieted. This alien from the stars had destroyed his life, killed his sister, and now doomed his world.

After Dib was so far out of the city he didn't now where he was, he fell down onto the grass. He was in a big open field, and despite the sub-zero wind chill he took off his trench coat and threw it as far as could. It drifted to the ground near him.

"Fuck!" Dib screamed at the top of his lungs, and then he fell down again. Tears rolled from his eyes, and he curled up on the ground. He could feel his feet bleeding in his boots, and his clothes were shredded all to hell. His hair was a mess. The two places he had been hit by lasers smoldered, and then slowly began to close into pink scars.

After a very long while, the boy stood up. He was fifteen, for Chrissake, but he had a job to do, goddamn it. He began to go back toward his home, not really knowing what to expect now that the alien had power. But one thing was for sure…

Dib would most certainly kill Zim.


End file.
